SDCI Data Improvement: Improvement and Sustainability of iRODS Data Grid Software for Multi-Disciplinary Community Driven Application

The integrated Rule Oriented Data System (iRODS) software is used in production systems on an international scale, supporting interdisciplinary research projects in seismology, oceanography, astronomy, plant biology, climate change, cognitive science, social sciences, psycholinguistics, and high-energy physics. The iRODS data grid supports collections at scale, from small 200 Gigabyte social science collections, to multi-petabyte collections of observational data.

This will fund the development of the iRODS infrastructure to incorporate new capabilities to meet the requirements by each user community, to support interoperability with domain specific technologies such as support for an extended metadata system, advanced data transport protocols, unification of authentication environments, user-selected access mechanisms, data analytic micro-services, and real-time data streams. This will also fund continued consulting support for installation and customization of the software, incorporation of new features developed by an international group of collaborators, and presentation of tutorials and workshops on applications of iRODS. We will develop rulekits that encapsulate standard policy and procedure sets to simplify use by new communities. We will collaborate with the University of Wisconsin on security appraisals to minimize vulnerabilities, and collaborate with the Renaissance Computing Institute on integration with cloud computing systems. We will explore research initiatives related to database federation and workflow integration to meet specific requirements of the user communities.

We will develop the mechanisms (improved user interfaces, documentation, and rulekits) that will enable use of the iRODS data grid at scale with thousands to millions of users. We will support the application of the iRODS infrastructure to NSF research initiatives with the explicit goal of enabling use of shared collections within institutional repositories for education initiatives. Since the policies used within iRODS to control collections can be tuned to meet specific community goals, iRODS can be used to integrate institutional repositories with NSF national research initiatives. iRODS can also link personal laptops into national collaborations, enabling policy-controlled participation by students in research initiatives. Through creation of standard rulekits, we will enable creation of reference collections within research projects, within institutional repositories, within national research projects, and within international collaborations.